Vicissitudes

How relaxing it is to have the political dramas of the year behind us. Now we can relax and get on with our lives. What a relief it is to be able to finish watching the classic series 'Press Gang', tear through the last few pages of 'The Moonstone', get to grips with Open University courses, and become irrationally enraged by any trifle that passes this way because of pent up stress. Not only are we finally free from politics, but the GCSE exams are over for those of my students going through that ordeal. They're free and clear! What lucky people they are!

Going from eight to four students does lead lead to a budget downgrade, but it also leads to a healthy respite from exam stress and extreme time pressure, and in this case the hopeful pleasure of a job well done. It also leads to a very beneficial respite from the horrors or being positive and reassuring at all times. I absolutely believe that all my students are going to do very well, but that heightened state of reassurance is a difficult trick to pull off. It's a necessary trick, too, because obvious and apparent confidence is a vital quality to convey... It's nice to be able to leave it at its normal level for a while.

What is to come, as we close in on Quirky Muffin eight hundred, and the week wends happily on? Well, there will much talk about books, films, radio and television, much storytelling, and in the remaining times far too much whittering about events unseen and words obscure and forgotten due to the enigmatic vicissitudes of time. In the remaining hours there will a mass of French and Spanish practice, but that concerns you not, dear illusory readers of this fair and silly mock journal.

Hmmm, there's a word that is used in context frequently without any knowledge of its definition:

vicissitude: mutability in life or nature (especially successive alternation from one condition to another)

How often have you used a similar phrase and invoked the vicissitudes without due research? I must have done it dozens of times! How many odd little vicissitudes has this very blog gone through? And large ones too? Many, and probably many more to come.

All hail the vicissitudes!

O.